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The Cortex-A15 Continues Running Strong On Linux

12-09-2012, 02:20 PM

Phoronix: The Cortex-A15 Continues Running Strong On Linux

Over the past several weeks of running the Samsung Chromebook with its Exynos 5 Dual SoC that is comprised of an ARM Cortex-A15 dual-core processor, I've grown quite fond of this latest ARM processor...

this is unbelievable, almost literally speaking. imagine how much performance would come out of a quad core - tegra 3 would be obliterated. intel is under some serious treat with this CPU. even the A9 was close in performance.

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this is unbelievable, almost literally speaking. imagine how much performance would come out of a quad core - tegra 3 would be obliterated. intel is under some serious treat with this CPU. even the A9 was close in performance.

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this is unbelievable, almost literally speaking. imagine how much performance would come out of a quad core - tegra 3 would be obliterated. intel is under some serious treat with this CPU. even the A9 was close in performance.

In terms of performance, ARM is nowhere close to Intel. The lowest end (non-Atom) Intel CPUs blow the ARM CPUs out of the water, and the Intel CPUs are getting better at almost the same rate as the ARM CPUs are (despite being so far ahead).

Of course, the ARMs aren't trying to compete with desktop Intel CPUs. Intel CPUs are made to be _fast_. ARM CPUs are made to be _efficient_, which means balancing fast with a very low power envelop. Intel's Atom CPUs might be in trouble, but I don't think that'll be a big problem; if Atom loses out, Intel will just start making ARM CPUs (which they used to, years and years and years ago, iirc; as did AMD).

Tegra is getting its ass kicked because Tegra is a piece of crap, which is 100% on NVIDIA, and has nothing to do with Intel. Tegra is an ARM core and a custom NVIDIA GPU (which has no relation to the GPU parts in your desktop/laptop GPUs), and has been kind of a baffling flop its whole life. The Tegra 1 and 2 didn't even have a SIMD unit, and the Tegra 3 has an 8+8 non-unified ALU cores in its GPU ("8+8 non-unified" meaning that the GPU is horribly under-utilized unless you have a perfectly balanced GPU workload), compared to a PowerVR *MP8 which has 8 unified SIMD cores (e.g. 2x as much processing power plus the capability to get closer to 100% utilization on the usual mixed GPU workloads). Even the PowerVR *MP4 GPUs get somewhere close to 4x the GFLOPS of the Tegra 3's GPU, due to a combination of better utilization of the hardware and the native SIMD-approach. People put a lot of hype around Tegra ("omg it's NVIDIA it's gonna be so fast and I'll have a GeForce in my phone!!~`1!1") but the reality is that it's just a mediocre ARM CPU with an even worse GPU. NVIDIA's expertise is not transitioning well to moble, and it's no surprise: how you make a power-hungry 1500-core high-bandwidth desktop GPU fast has absolutely nothing to do with how you make a power-efficient 8-core bandwidth-starved mobile GPU fast.

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well CO elanthis, you did take into consideration that the older tests show this first foundry run (TRAY priced at $20-$30 ?) slower clocked dual core A15 with slower RAM etc was still doing rather well at 50% or more against the i3-330M, 2.13 GHz, 4 Threads, 1066 DDR3, 35 W,TRAY priced at $225.00

i forget is this Samsung A15 a dual channel or single channel ram SOC ! so potentially artificially slowed down throughput by a lot there too, and its not like they even have any Samsung wideIO mobile ram on there yet ether, so theres a potential massive throughput speed boost in the future for any SOC using that OC, (supposed to be available in 2013 but possibly delayed 2 years now).

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In terms of performance, ARM is nowhere close to Intel. The lowest end (non-Atom) Intel CPUs blow the ARM CPUs out of the water, and the Intel CPUs are getting better at almost the same rate as the ARM CPUs are (despite being so far ahead).

Of course, the ARMs aren't trying to compete with desktop Intel CPUs.

maybe they dont try to but they do... I will not be overduing it arm is such long crap as the opensource grafics drivers are worse than lets say the amd-driver or maybe even the nouvou driver... it stands and falls with that.

That is btw also my most important question can you view 1080p videos with the free drivers with doing by some hardware-parts not the cpu? I mean is there something like va-api working?

So for what desktop operation is a amd x2 3800+ not fast enough? current games... that is all... all other tasks are some specialist things... I would not call that desktop I would call that workstation or something like that. The same is true for my E350 Systems they are aproximitly nearly at the same speed. So if there would be quadcore version of this cpu here... I think its fast enough for desktop or call it office... it would be not fast enough for gaming what maybe 5% of the "desktop" systems are used to... so replace gaming for your desktop and your statement is true...

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this is unbelievable, almost literally speaking. imagine how much performance would come out of a quad core - tegra 3 would be obliterated. intel is under some serious treat with this CPU. even the A9 was close in performance.

If you feel up to it, buy a nexus4 smartphone and run some benchmarks on it. Its a quad-core krait (i.e. A15 with alternative branding).

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If you feel up to it, buy a nexus4 smartphone and run some benchmarks on it. Its a quad-core krait (i.e. A15 with alternative branding).

while the Krait' With (quad?) Adreno 320 smartphone seems fine even though its not a real Corex core, it would be far more cost effective to buy 2 of those cheap Exynos 4 quad ODROID-U2 Prime with quad Mali-400 440MHz (600MHz) for linux use at the same price as the single phone ,and OC you get to use HW assisted driver blob's when they make them generally available perhaps this month! or at least before march/April when the real cortex A15 quad should be available, the question is also which OSS 2d/3d driver gets released first OC and do you want to be messing around rooting your device etc....